Quote Originally Posted by Proletariat
I don't find it very difficult to understand why there was a general mistrust towards Japanese Americans when you consider the significant cultural differences coupled with their nationalistic perception.
I'd say the racist perception of Japanese by Americans was more to blame for the internment policy than anything else, coupled of course with economic envy: business owners wanted to get rid of Japanese competitors, labour organisations wanted to get rid of Japanese workers whose presence lowered wages and living conditions. The Japanse had been pioneer farmers on the West Coast for generations. White farmer organisations lobbying for their internment wanted their lands, white businessmen lobbied for the confiscation and public sale of Japanese shops, factories, farms and fishing vessels whilst their owners were being interned in camps.

The Japanese were among the few groups of immigrants who until 1952 were ineligible for U.S. citizenship for racial reasons alone. Clauses against renting or selling to 'Orientals' were routinely written into real estate contracts, anti-miscegenation laws barred their marriage to whites, and Japanese children had to go to segregated schools. No wonder many Americans saw 'significant cultural differences' between themselves and Japanese. That is what officially sanctioned racism does.

Even the chief official in charge of the internment, Wartime Relocation Authority Director Milton Eisenhower, thought it was racism, as he wrote in countless memo's to the President and others in authority.

Here's one of his memos to Roosevelt from April 1943:

...My friends in the War Relocation Authority, like Secretary Ickes, are deeply distressed over the effects of the entire evacuation and relocation program upon the Japanese-Americans, particularly upon the young citizen group. Persons in this group find themselves living in an atmosphere for which their public school and democratic teachings have not prepared them. It is hard for them to escape a conviction that their plight is due more to racial discrimination, economic motivations, and wartime prejudices than to any real necessity from the military point of view for evacuation from the West Coast.
Life in a relocation center cannot possibly be pleasant. The evacuees are surrounded by barbed wire fences under the eyes of armed military police. They have suffered heavily in property losses; they have lost their businesses and their means of support. The State Legislatures, Members of the Congress, and local groups, by their actions and statements bring home to them almost constantly that as a people they are not really welcome anywhere. States in which they are now located have enacted restrictive legislation forbidding permanent resettlement, for example. The American Legion, many local groups, and city councils have approved discriminatory resolutions, going so far in some instances as to advocate confiscation of their property. Bills have been introduced which would deprive them of citizenship...
Furthermore, in the opinion of the evacuees the Government may not be excused for not having attempted to distinguish between the loyal and the disloyal in carrying out the evacuation.
Under such circumstances it would be amazing if extreme bitterness did not develop.
...The director of the Authority is striving to avoid, if possible, creation of a racial minority problem after the war which might result in something akin to Indian reservations. It is for these reasons primarily, I think, that he advocates the maximum individual relocation as against the maintenance of all ten relocation centers...
Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote in his 1947 memoirs:

American citizens of Japanese origin were not even handled like aliens of the other enemy nationalities -- Germans and Italians -- on a selective basis, but as untouchables, a group who could not be trusted and had to be shut up only because they were of Japanese descent...
Their constitutional rights were the same as those of the men who were responsible for the program.
My impression is that apart from a few (mainly military) hardliners in the U.S. government, few politicians actually wanted the Japanese Americans to be interned. Milton Eisenhower himself hated the policy and despised the hard-liners who saw any use for it. A post-war congressional investigation established that there had been no need for their internment whatsoever. But the powers that be, including Roosevelt, had to give in to public pressure and indignation whipped up by racism and racist organisations directed specifically against Japanese.
What was your point in bringing up the posters portraying the Japanese as rats?
I answered Beirut's remark about the morality of the Pacific War. Shit happens, even in great democracies. Admit it.